Changing Genre Conventions In Historical English News Discourse

This volume explores the dynamics of genre conventions in historical English news discourse. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of news writing and publication formats: from corantos to modern tabloids, from prototypical hard news stories and crime reports to more specialised genres such as medical and scientific news, advertisements, death notices and spoof news. Investigating linguistic, pragmatic and social factors, the authors trace the triggers, mechanisms and agents of change that have shaped genre conventions in historical news discourse from the 17th century to the present day.

The history of English news discourse is characterised by intriguing multilevel developments, and the present cannot be separated from them. For example, audience engagement is by no means an invention of the digital age. This collection highlights major topics that range from newspaper genres like sports reports, advertisements and comic strips to a variety of news practices. All contributions view news discourse in a specific historical period or across time and relate language features to their sociohistorical contexts and changing ideologies. The varying needs and expectations of the newspaper producers, writers and readers, and even news agents, are taken into account. The articles use interdisciplinary study methods and move at interfaces between sociolinguistics, journalism, semiotics, literary theory, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociology.

This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in a range of historical genres and contexts of text production, mediation and consumption. However, more fundamentally, it also seeks to expand our conception of text and the communicative ‘spaces’ surrounding them, and probe the explanatory potential of the concepts under investigation. Though essentially rooted in historical linguistics and philology, the twelve contributions of this volume are also open to insights from other disciplines (such as medieval manuscript studies and bibliography, but also information studies, marketing studies, and even digital electronics), and thus tackle opportunities and challenges in researching the dynamics of text and framing phenomena in a historical perspective.

The updated and revised edition of this volume maintains its focus on the dialectic interrelation between ‘news’ and ‘change’. News is intended as a textual type in its evolutionary – and revolutionary – development, while change is discussed with reference to the form, content and structure of news texts. The news texts in question range from the first forms of periodical news in the seventeenth century up to the news blogs and social media of the present day. Divided into four chapters, representing key historical moments in the process of news writing, each chapter makes use of a set of corpora specifically designed to suit the needs of scholars working in those particular fields. Topics that the authors examine include pronominal usage and the interrelationship between news writer and reader, heads and headlines, the language of advertisements and other text classes, the trend towards conversationalization, and impartiality and ‘perspective’ in modern-day news. These and other topics, coupled with the varying corpora that are exploited to analyse them, call into question basic methodological issues that are examined from different perspectives. Throughout the volume, the authors contextualise the news publications of the day so as to better understand the continuous process of adjustment and renewal that news texts are subject to over time.

The original studies in this volume provide new insights into the history of medical discourse across centuries in both professional and lay texts. The central themes deal with changes in medical writing in various societal and cultural contexts in search for best practices in corpus pragmatics for future work. Some studies apply quantitative methods of corpus linguistics and Digital Humanities, others adopt a qualitative, discourse-analytical perspective, focusing on particular texts, authors or medical topics, or specific functionally-defined discourse forms such as narratives. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are mutually complementary and shed light on different aspects of historical medical discourse. The methodologies aim at establishing validity and reliability for pragmatic analysis, taking into account relevant contextual factors and insights from other fields, such as medical and social history, history of ideas, and science studies.

Representing what someone else has said is an integral part of spoken and written communication. Speech representation occurs in many contexts from news reports and legal trials to everyday conversation. Although commonplace, it requires sophisticated choices regarding what to represent and how to represent it. These choices can highlight a speaker's voice, shape our perception of the reported speech, or support our claims of authority.While speech representation in Present-day English has been studied extensively, this book extends the discussion to historical periods. Speech Representation in the History of English explores speech representation of the past, providing in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods (1500-1900), this volume covers topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Chapters draw on a wide range of methodologies, including historical sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics, and cover many genres from witness depositions, literary texts, and letters, to the spoken language of the recent past. In this comprehensive volume, Peter Grund and Terry Walker bring together a collection of works that use cutting-edge approaches to speech representation. Researchers and students of the history of English, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies alike will find Speech Representation in the History of English to be an invaluable addition to the field.

Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this book offers novel perspectives on the history of medical writing and scientific thought-styles by examining patterns of change and reception in genres, discourse, and lexis in the period 1500-1820. Each chapter demonstrates in detail how changing textual forms were closely tied to major multi-faceted social developments: industrialisation, urbanisation, expanding trade, colonialization, and changes in communication, all of which posed new demands on medical care. It then shows how these developments were reflected in a range of medical discourses, such as bills of mortality, medical advertisements, medical recipes, and medical rhetoric, and provides an extensive body of case studies to highlight how varieties of medical discourse have been targeted at different audiences over time. It draws on a wide range of methodological frameworks and is accompanied by numerous relevant illustrations, making it essential reading for academic researchers and students across the human sciences.

The chapters collected in this volume examine how the sociohistorical and cultural context may influence structural features of lexis and text types. Each paper pays particular attention to social ‘labels’ and attitudes (conservative, religious, ideological, endearing, or other), thereby focusing on their dynamic and historical dimension. Changes in these are analyzed in order to explain morphological, lexical, and textual changes that would otherwise be hard to account for. Together, they provide a varied window on the effect of historical versions of a dynamic society on lexis and text. Examining lexical and textual change in history from a sociocultural perspective teaches us a great deal – not just about the past, but it also makes us think about similar phenomena in the present, enhancing our knowledge about how universally human some of these phenomena are. This volume will be of great interest to (English) historical linguists, sociolinguists, and scholars of sociohistorical and cultural studies.